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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

"Massive disruption" of what kind? Current AI abilities make white-collar work more productive and potentially higher-paid, not less.

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Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? I am already massively more productive at work using AI. I'm not getting paid more, and I'm not working fewer hours. The road we are headed down is one where all of the economic benefits go straight to the owning class.

For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. It's not universal and it's not instantaneous, but the base level assumption should be that increases in productivity will lead to increases in wages in the long run and we should have specific reasons why it won't happen for a given case to believe otherwise.

> For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history

Historically, increased productivity has almost literally never increased wages or benefits without worker uprisings

Seriously look into the history of labor and automation

Cool. What worker uprising occurred in the US in 1995? I (and basically every economist) disagree with your interpretation of historical events.

https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370

Where is worker productivity on that graph exactly?

Why does that matter? According to you, productivity is not what leads to increases in wages. You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising. I showed that worker wages went up starting in 1995. According to you, there must have been a worker uprising to explain that.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic, but bluefirebrand did not claim that wages only go up because of worker uprisings.

In the long term, the only thing that _can_ increase wages on average and in general is productivity. Productivity increases mean the pie is bigger, and without that, there is no where for increased wages to come _from_. So by saying that producity only results in increased wages in the case of the worker uprising, that is equivalent to saying that wages can only rise from a worker uprising. The only way this isn't true is for some other proposed mechanism for worker wages to go up, and the only other methods would be short time, single increases where all you are doing is taking from someone else (presumably capital I guess?)

Sustained rates of increase _require_ increasing productivity. So no, they didn't explicitly state it, what they explicitly said was that productivity only results in increased wages if a worker uprising forces it. But that's the logical requirement of that statement.

> there is no where for increased wages to come _from

The pie doesn't have to grow when the pie is already massive, but only 1% of people are taking 90% of the pie

20-22% of the pie in the US.

Sure, whatever.

The point was not in the exact number

The point is that there is an answer to "Where could increased wages come from if we don't increase productivity"

We don't have to increase productivity to pay some of the population less and other parts of the population more

You can get short term or one time increases by taking from somewhere else, but without productivity gains, it's an inherently limited, zero sum game.

It's not short-term or one-time if you're taking away and redistributing the economic rent that those people collect from the rest of us.

> You claimed that wages only ever go up with a worker uprising.

I'm not sure you really understood my original post. I never said or meant to imply that wages never grow ever

I was talking about how increases in productivity do not lead to proportionally increased wages

Look, here's an example. Let's say I'm a worker producing Widgets for $20/hour by hand, and I can produce 10 widgets an hour. The company sells widgets for $10 each

In one hour I have produced $100 worth of widgets. The company pays me $20, the company keeps $80

Now the company buys a WidgetMachine. Using the WidgetMachine I can now produce 20 widgets an hour

I now produce $200 worth of Widgets per hour. The company still pays me $20, the company has now earned $180

My productivity has doubled, but my wage hasn't

So next year inflation is $5. The company increases my income to $25, starts charging a couple of cents more per Widget so they can absorb my wage increase without any change to their bottom line

My wage matches inflation, it still "grows" but it is completely divorced from my productivity

More importantly, my wage growing to match inflation doesn't help my buying power even remotely. If my wage only goes up to match exactly inflation then all I'm ever doing is treading water. At best all I can do is keep the exact same standard of living and lifestyle

Increases in "real wages" should have "real" impact on your life, it should let you have a better life than before

I never claimed that workers get 100% of the increase in productivity. I said that increased productivity leads to increased wages. Increased productivity is in fact a _requirement_ for wages to go up (note that I am _not_ claiming that in increase in productivity _must_ result in increase wages. It is necessary, but not always sufficient), or else there is no where for those increases to come from. So when you claim that productivity increases _only_ result in worker wages increasing in the co-occurence of a worker uprising, that is the same thing as claiming that worker uprisings are a requirement.

So I showed you an increase in worker wages. If there is not corresponding worker uprising, your original claim is false.

And,again, you keep ignoring that the plot I showed is already inflation adjusted. It is a real increase, not a nominal increase.

> Increased productivity is in fact a _requirement_ for wages to go up

No it isn't. This is an extremely naive understanding of how any of this works

You even say it yourself, with the silly graph you keep posting

That graph doesn't show productivity it just shows "real inflation adjusted wages", like you keep harping on about.

But in general a person is not increasing their productivity year over year. So why would their wage go up to match inflation if, as you say, wages only go up when productivity increases? That doesn't make sense

The reality is that people already provide their employers with vastly more productivity than they are paid for. Their employers are capturing the majority of the value from that productivity. If someone's wage goes up to match inflation, their productivity hasn't increased, inflation has increase the value of their current productivity

You seriously don't seem to understand how any of this works

Given that economists almost universally agree with me, I'm going to have to suggest that it is in fact you who don't know know how any of this works.

You keep shifting the goal posts, you keep talking about unrelated things, and you keep not addressing the core claims, and you keep not responding to the main refutation of your own original claim. I'm done beating my head against this wall. I hope you have a nice day.

> Given that economists almost universally agree with me

I'm amazed you've found that all economists that can universally agree on anything. Economists don't know how any of this works either. Economics is not a science, and you can find data to support basically an unlimited number of arguments.

I raise you this chart:

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Change 1979q4–2025q1:

Productivity +86.0%

Hourly pay +32.0%

Productivity has grown 2.7x as much as pay

Luckily for me, I didn't claim (nor do I believe) that workers/wages capture 100% of productivity.

Sub-6% unemployment: https://www.investopedia.com/historical-us-unemployment-rate...

Capital doesn't pay labor unless it has to.

Average wages = f(labor productivity, demand for labor, labor supply)

The AGI future is that demand for labor crashes.

US unemployment rate is currently 4.2%. There is no prospect of real AGI any time soon.

There doesn't have to be to cause a substantial structural unemployment jump.

Even AI that's only borderline competent at fuzzy 'file these files into these systems' admin work would wipe out a class of middle income jobs.

And given that's basically here today technologically, we're in the digestion and expansion phase.

Perhaps someday, but so far that remains entirely speculative. The data doesn't show any structural unemployment jump.

All three initials of "[A]rtificial [G]eneral [I]ntelligence" have multiple meanings.

For the sake of employment, consider what happens if we can show that some model is equal-or-better than an IQ 85 human on all tasks for which you can actually get paid, while on hardware such that it is at least real-time and costs no more than whatever minimum wage is where you are. At this point, 16% of the population are never, ever, worth paying for.

I think current models and cheapest hardware aren't quite that combination of generality and cost — but the best models can do it, and hardware of fixed performance is still getting cheaper.

We're a long, long way from having a reliable, inexpensive robot that can snake out a plugged toilet.

1) From what I've heard*, IQ 85 is about the lowest you can be and still function as a plumber. My statement stands about everyone less clever than the worst — not average, worst — plumber.

2) for all values of X in the last two years, every time someone suggests "robots/AI are nowhere near doing X", if X is coherent**, either an AI can already do X, or at most ends up doing it within six months.

So, anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJIuns9nRk

* Which is really vague due to (1) how mediocre IQ tests are in practice and (2) the internet being full of oft-repeated nonsense since day zero

** The two things people end up correctly saying AI can't do, are (1) "solve the halting problem", and (2) reinvent literally everything starting from first principles.

You could easily rephrase that as "Historically, worker uprisings have almost literally never increased wages or benefits, absent increased productivity" and it would be a lot closer to the truth of how automation impacts wages.

> For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history.

Not in the last 40 years in real income terms: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

This trend is likely to accelerate (productivity skyrocketing, wages stagnant)

you are confusing increases in profits with increases in wages :)

> Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI?

We’re on HN. AI makes it easier for you to disrupt your employer.

* Unless your employer happens to have engineered a monopoly

Why would your employer pay you more for using Python/Java/JavaScript? You're massively more productive when using those languages instead of C for many common development tasks.

Did the introduction of Python drastically reduce software developer salaries?

{Total demand for software} is oddly not being mentioned by most people in this thread.

First approximation, there are two AI coding futures:

1. AI coding increases software development productivity, decreasing the cost of software, stimulating more demand for the now more efficient development.

2. AI coding increases software development productivity such that the existing labor pool is too large for demand.

I'd hazard (1) in the short term and (2) in the long term.

You need to switch jobs in order to get paid at market rate. Companies have found that they do not need to keep up with the market rate to retain employees.

It varies by company.

I know of at least one major company that continually benchmarks market rates and uses those as default raises.

Unsurprisingly, they have an average tenure of 10+ years...

Owning what? Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation. Open Source models are already the thing that you can use to code with, and will obviously get better. We have to believe some really weird stuff for this vision to be coherent, for example a nvidia-everything-world, where they are not only the sole provider of hardware but also control access to all relevant models, and all software products that any (non-tech) business needs to use AI.

If by "owning class" you actually mean "all people with agency" then, yeah, I agree.

> Your employer (likely) owns little of value in a world of cheap AI software generation.

That applies to you, not to your employer - in your hands, "cheap AI software generation" is, well... cheap. On the other hand, your employer owns patents, copyrights, distribution channels, politicians and connections - those become more valuable as the coding skills get cheaper. The "owning class" are those who own most of the high value items enumerated above.

I don't know who you are describing, but it's certainly nothing close to the median employer.

The median employer isn't in the software business either, so "cheap coding" has little direct effect on them and it doesn't help the agency-rocking small fish in any way. However, as customers, the median employers are highly dependent upon precisely the type of employer I described, not upon "people with agency".

Productivity per capita is dramatically up since the 1970s. Wages are flat. Employers are greedy and short sighted.

Employers would rather pay more to hire someone new who doesn't know their business than give a raise to an existing employee who's doing well. They're not going to pay someone more because they're more productive, they'll pay them the same and punish anyone who can't meet the new quota.

This is not true. Wages did stagnate from about the mid 70s until about the mid 90s, but median, real wages have been increasing steadily since then [0]

[0] https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370

Sounds like wages are about 20 years removed where they should be then, since cost of living didn't exactly stagnate for 20 years

"Real" as opposed to "nominal" in this context means inflation adjusted, which means that wages have been increasing faster than inflation for 30 years. Now, it is true that some components of cost of living, most notably housing, have (especially in particular regions) also increased in cost faster than the general inflation level. But that's not due to some inherent breakdown between productivity and wages. It's due to a series of bad policy and development choices mostly in cities.

So if you want to have that discussion, that's fine, but it's totally separate from the original discussion about productivity and wages.

> which means that wages have been increasing faster than inflation for 30 years

If you look at the graph you posted and carried the slope of the pre-70s trajectory forward, assuming that the 70s-90s slump had not happened, would the graph end in the same place it is currently?

No. Not even close

> So if you want to have that discussion, that's fine, but it's totally separate from the original discussion about productivity and wages.

It's absolutely not a separate discussion, the end result is that the same "real wage" that used to provide a comfortable life is now poverty

You cannot just shrug your shoulders and say "well incomes are matching productivity so this is fine actually"

The average us worker now had to complete with more women entering the workforce and entering more fields and careers. They also had to compete with ever increasing numbers of immigrants and they had to compete with foreign workers.

When you massively increase the supply of labor, you’re going to have downward pressure on wages.

Increasing and stagnating are not mutually exclusive. Wages may be increasing, but the benefits of productivity gains have not been evenly distributed. Productivity has increased faster than wages have, and difference has gone to the already wealthy.

> Productivity has increased faster than wages have, and difference has gone to the already wealthy.

What/who has financed productivity increases? Isn’t it tools and infrastructure etc. for the most part, paid for by asset owners? There are likely exceptions, but big picture.

Compare to productivity: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Capital earn more than Work since the 90s-2000s(depending on the country).

Now, imagine a 70s - present where the labor supply curve didn’t didn’t massively shift because of women and foreign trade.

Companies are actively not hiring expecting AI to compensate and still have growth. I have seen these same companies giving smaller raises and less promotions, and eliminate junior positions.

The endgame isn't more employees or paying them more. It's paying less people or no skilled people when possible.

That's a fairly massive disruption.

We're just 3 years after a giant hiring binge, a similar amount of time post zero interest rates, the US economy has been threatening recession for two years, and economic uncertainty is very high, and post Covid had a glut of junior engineers coming onto the market. Between all of these plausible explanations for why hiring is way down, is there macro economic evidence it really is AI and not anything else?

That hiring binge was already nullified by the waves of layoffs.

I think everything else you’re saying is happening/has happened but companies hiring less because of anticipated AI productivity gains is also occurring. Like the scuttlebutt I hear about certain faangs requiring managers have 9-10 direct reports now instead of 7

All that I've seen with AI in the workplace is my coworkers becoming dumber. Asking them technical questions they should know the answer to has turned into "let me LLM that for you" and giving me an overly broad response. It's infuriating. I've also hilariously seen this in meetings, where folks are being asked something and awkwardly fill time while they wait for a response which they try and not read word for word.

That's totally normal actually. When you ask, you have to tell them "Think through this step by step."

I don't believe them. I believe that as we exit zero interest rates, companies have to cut back and "we are doing AI" is easier to sell the investors and even their own employees than "yeah we want to spend less on people".

You seem to have the same opinion as kbos87 then, because given your higher productivity, do you honestly think there will not be less job openings from your employer going forward?

What you just said as a rebuttal was pretty much his point, you just didn't internalize what the productivity gains mean at the macro level, only looking at the select few that will continue to have a job

Were there "less job openings from our employers" when the software industry shifted en masse from coding in FORTRAN to C/C++, then to Java and later on to Python and JavaScript? Each of these choices came with a massive gain in productivity. Why then did the software sector grow and not shrink at the macro level?

USA is presently in the midst of a massive offshoring of software jobs which will only continue to accelerate as AI becomes better. These are "white collar" jobs that will never come back.

> a massive offshoring of software jobs

Where have I heard this before? The drawbacks of offshoring are well known by now and AI does not really mitigate them to any extent.

So many of the drawbacks have been mitigated at this point too. Offshore teams are well organized, have their own managers, orgs, the offshore talent has really grown in ths last few decades with many excellent engineers, and remote/async work has become a first class citizen now. Despite offshore getting way better, the US jobs market in IT has not collapsed.

US tech jobs market has collapsed. Although partially self-inflicted wounds. If you don’t think so, you haven’t looked for a job in a while.

AI should improve code quality for these offshore teams. That leaves time zone issues, which may or may not be a problem. If it is, offshore to Latin America.

> If you don’t think so, you haven’t looked for a job in a while.

This is not an argument. Any individuals experience is not going to be anything of a representative sample of pretty much anything. You need data to make your claim. You probably will also need to define "collapse."

US-based AI companies are doing pretty well, if there were a collapse, that would not be the case. Plenty of companies are hiring. The job market is not what it was when there were 0% interest rates, but "collapsed" - that's some hot-take shit IMO good for twitter and clicks.

No. I guess it wasn’t clear, you thought I meant that tech companies completely shut down or something. That’s not it.

The new job market has collapsed. I’ve never had trouble getting interviews before. Offers have been difficult yes, but interviews, always got plenty.

I have twenty plus years experience in modern tech stacks, last five in ETL which was a good field. And haven’t received a single interview this year.

Section 174, BigTech layoffs, DOGE, higher interest rates, and more. Try getting a job outside of your network just for practice and you’ll see something has fundamentally changed.

The USA has "presently" been offshoring software development jobs since around 2001.

I remember, because the same type of people dooming about AI were also telling me, a university student at the time, that I shouldn't get into software development, because salaries would cap out at $50k/year due to competition with low-cost offshore developers in India and Bangladesh.

Salaries are determined by the replacement cost of the employee in question, not their productivity. How does AI increase wages?

so if they are more productive, does that not mean companies will need fewer staff? Why would they give you more pay when they can so easily replace you. Remember, you're not doing much of the work anymore so expect lower pay.

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